Wednesday, May 31, 2017

A Project Baltimore investigation has found five Baltimore City high schools and one middle school do not have a single student proficient in the state tested subjects of math and English...

Navon Warren grew up in West Baltimore. He was three months old when his father was shot to death. Before his 18th birthday, he would lose two uncles and a classmate, all gunned down on the streets of Baltimore...

High school students are tested by the state in math and English. Their scores place them in one of five categories – a four or five is considered proficient and one through three are not. At Frederick Douglass (where Navon goes to school), 185 students took the state math test last year and 89 percent fell into the lowest level. Just one student approached expectations and scored a three.

Simple Analysis

Navon's classmates are essentially illiterate and unemployable. They're growing up in a war zone. I didn't look it up, but illegitimacy rates must be near 80% in their neighborhoods. For all intents and purposes, there are no whites, asians or hispanics around them. The entire government is made up of Democrats and has been for decades.

The problem cannot be political because there is only one side present.

The problem cannot be racial because there is only one race present.

Go ahead and argue politics and racism all you want. Go ahead and tear down Confederate war memorials and burn the Dixie flag. Go ahead and scream about white supremacists on campus. Talk about economic opportunity zones and tax cuts and over-regulation until you're blue in the face. Wear your Make American Great Again hat until it's glued to your head. Talk about LGBT rights morning, noon and night. March and protest about Global Warming Climate Change until you're exhausted. None of it matters to these kids.

Here's an entire generation who are not capable of making use of anything but the most basic handouts because they lack the core skills of literacy and mathematics.

Why?

Without intact, traditional families and the stability and social structure they create, these kids are utterly screwed.

By the way, good luck getting these guys to help out with the $20B Federal debt we've accumulated.

Update: It's not funding, either. The Baltimore School District spends 50% above the national average per student.

Monday, May 29, 2017

Conservative firebrand Kurt Schlichter issued a barely-veiled call for violence or at least a justification for it today.

We don’t like the new rules – I’d sure prefer a society where no one was getting attacked, having walked through the ruins of a country that took that path – but we normals didn’t choose the new rules. The left did. It gave us Ferguson, Middlebury College, Berkeley, and “Punch a Nazi” – which, conveniently for the left, translates as “punch normals.” And many of us have had personal experiences with this New Hate – jobs lost, hassles, and worse. Some scumbags at an anti-Trump rally attacked my friend and horribly injured his dog. His freaking dog.

So when we start to adopt their rules, they’re shocked? Have they ever met human beings before? It’s not a surprise. It’s inevitable.

I've been trying to figure this one out - why it is that the media has excused or ignored the violence of ANITFA, Black Lives Matter, college students and protesters at Trump rallies. Of course there's the whacking great bias on their part, but there's something else, a disconnect of some sort.

Kurt's essay revealed it to me.

When was the last time you were in a real fight? How often do they happen in your neighborhood? How about at your kids' schools? Probably pretty rarely. That's not true for a big chunk of the population, the part that lives outside the elites' bubble. Those murder stats in Chicago and elsewhere are just the tip of the iceberg. Below the water line are huge numbers of assaults, rapes and child abuse cases.

When George Stephanopoulos goes home, he doesn't drive into a neighborhood with bars on the windows and razor wire topping the fences. When George Will goes home, he doesn't see drunk dudes on the street corners lighting up blunts, giving him the evil eye. They may read about it, but they don't know it. It's not real to them.

In such a neighborhood, you know that if you punch a dude, he's going to come back at you. If you stab him and don't kill him, you've just earned an enemy for whom violence is not theoretical. The pampered children at or universities who stand 9" away from a professor or public speaker and scream at them have probably never been punched out in their lives.

Try that in Compton or a coal mining town in West Virginia.

Whether the progressives running our colleges, news media and entertainment industry know it or not, a lot of people live in that more primal world. At some point, that blue collar, white redneck you've been calling a racist homophobe for years is going to have had enough of this. Voting for Trump was just the start. That rumble where the ANTIFA punks got stomped is the next logical step.

Sunday, May 28, 2017

... are the very definition of adorable. Friends of ours have a 12-week-old and he's so sweet you'll need an insulin shot after you play with him for a while. I left the images a bit big, so I think they're worth a click.

Saturday, May 27, 2017

A few days back, low-wattage-bulb Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (what a great name for the topic!) was grilling the head of DC police over diversity in his department when it detoured into a discussion of a hard drive that had been seized from an aide of hers who had been shot.

Note: That same aide has been the subject of numerous psychotic breaks by the execrable Sean Hannity. In his delirium, he imagines the aide to be the victim of a massive political conspiracy. Sean's a rabid, partisan swine, so this is "normal" for him.

What fascinated me was not the fact that Wasserman-Schultz ended the interrogation by crudely threatening the chief of police, but the initial discussion about "diversity." I felt like I was watching some small town junior theater put on a play about life in Germany after Hitler's Mein Kampf had come out.

Biology professor Bret Weinstein (of Evergreen State College in Washington) was berated by dozens of students outside of his classroom Tuesday morning for refusing to participate in an event in which white people were invited to leave campus for a day. Now, he says police have told him to hold his classes off campus due to safety concerns.

Weißer Mann, raus!

This has reached the level of a mania. It's strictly emotive. There's no logic, no reasoning, no knowledge, no literacy, just a frenzy of agitation. Police are asking the dude to stay away in order to prevent a localized reenactment of Kristallnacht.

But no one has read Lee's letters. No one is taught who he was outside of his role in the Confederacy. No one is taught how former slave-trader and Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest found racial redemption at the end of his life to the point where blacks paid their respects at his funeral. We're only taught unreasoning hate based on the color of our skins.

I'm back to reading Mein Kampf and I'm at a part where Hitler, ever ignorant like our Social Justice Warriors, is whining that Germany was totally innocent in the First World War. It's similar to the way we neglect the role the Ashanti played in the slave trade or how the Aztecs enslaved and butchered people or how American Indians practiced slavery or ... or ... or. Just like Hitler turned the Volk into a race of saints, we turn whitey into a race of villains.

This has gotten me to wondering. If one reproduced a version of the Nuremberg race laws with modern sensitivities, could you peddle it on campuses and get them to buy in?

Sadly, Elizabeth Warren still isn't an American Indian, even under this schema.

Friday, May 26, 2017

... or maybe not. Do you want people with anger management issues to be "woke?"

What happens when:

The personal becomes political,

We stay engaged like Michelle Obama wanted,

We get in their faces and punch back twice as hard like Barack wanted,

We confront our congresscritters like all the activists tell us,

We decide that words can be acts of violence like the students tell us,

We fixate on race like the DNC and

We fixate on gender like ESPN where the gave an award to Bruce Jenner for bravery?

Doesn't this all lead to yelling and violence? If everyone is agitated about everything, if some percentage of "everyone" tends to fits of rage, then aren't we just asking for physical altercations, a la the ANTIFA riots?

If I have an anger problem and you're trying to tell me how to run almost every aspect of my life, aren't you risking a punch in the mouth?

Maybe we should back off from this a bit and let people live their lives with as little interference as possible.

This is what occurred to me after the Montana Republican candidate shoved a reporter and everyone took sides. Reporters were aghast that a lot of people approved of the shoving.

I don't understand the surprise. We've been sprinting in this direction for years. The guy's job is to keep his finger on the pulse of society. What does he do all day that he doesn't expect this response? Whoever has been paying him ought to ask for his money back.

And what was the Republican doing shoving the reporter in the first place? Trying out for the Antifa squad? Get a grip, dude. Better yet, see a therapist.

The progression leading to shoving and punching and worse is straightforward. Government is managed through politics. Politics is arguing. Arguing is divisive and can make people angry. Angry people can sometimes get violent. Ergo, bigger government eventually leads to more violence. At least that's what seems logical to me.

I'd say that one of the reasons there's so much rancor in the country is that we're arguing politics over almost everything, thanks to an endlessly growing government.

Thursday, May 25, 2017

Why do we allow things to remain named after Robert Byrd, who was an avowed white supremacist, but we take down statues of Robert E. Lee, who was anti-slavery at a time and place where that was a liability?

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

That is, do the better ones win out over time while the poor ones die out? Is long existence an indication of competitive advantage?

Example #1: Socialism is about 150 years old. In that time, it's been the Cleveland Browns of philosophies, losing badly almost everywhere. Are we watching its death throes with North Korea and Venezuela? Countries will still back into it over time as government grows like Kudzu until it strangles an economy and needs to be cut way back, but that's not the same as deliberately committing to socialism.

Example #2: Christianity overcame slavery. The idea that each person has equal value because they were created in the image of God may not be universal, but it was the foundation for the defeat of slavery over much of the world. Do we expect slavery to make a comeback? I don't think so. That looks like an evolutionary dead end.

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

I'm closing in on finishing my MGB rewiring project. Over and over again, I've come up against the problem of finding a way to splice or create wiring junctions. Because the worst part of building you own harness is getting the lengths just right - too long and things dangle, too short and things don't reach. What I'd really like is a 5x1 or 3x1 or Nx1 junction with quick disconnect tabs so I could make separate connector cables for each item on the circuit.

Ground wires, dashboard gauge lights, there are all kinds of places where I need wires to connect to each other.

If you solder or use butt connectors and you get the lengths wrong, you're hosed. Too long means you need to cut out a portion and add another connector. Too short and you need to throw away the whole thing and start again. Honestly, it's been the hardest part of the project by miles.

I still don't have an answer. I've taken to measuring distances with string, adding a couple of inches for safety and then cutting my wires to match. I then use butt connectors and shrink-wrap for the junctions. I just wish I had either access to easy-to-use junctions or a way of building my own.

Monday, May 22, 2017

Once you've worked in a field for a long time, you have developed skills and a reputation. Most people respect you and will at least listen to what you have to say if not act upon it. It dawned on me recently that should I change careers due to retirement or something else, I'd have to be willing to go back to square one and start at the bottom again.

For me, barely-suppressed-arrogant by nature, this will take some effort. Don't you know who I am? will be ringing in my head over and over again. I noticed that in Cursillo where I've only been asked to give a talk 3 times in 7 years. Me! I do this all the time at work! I'm well-paid to do it, too! Don't they know who I am?

Whoops. I did it again.

No, they don't know who I am and it would be a good idea to get off my high horse (more of a giraffe, really) and cheerfully pay my dues like I did when I was 23. I wasn't full of myself back then.

I'm not sure where life will lead post-retirement, but that date is now only low single digit years away, so some thought and experimentation will have to be devoted to answering that question. Posts dealing with it will start to show up from time to time here. In any case, working on true humility as opposed to well-masked arrogance will be a good start.

Sunday, May 21, 2017

Data point #37,216 showing that post-modernism is a religion: Dig this synopsis of an article discussing common traits of those who reject feminism. Here's the payoff if you don't want to click.

The author argues that a regime of rationality still operates in the academy and is made evident when feminist course content is met with continual dismissal or disavowal.

The best part is that the article is in Science Direct, presumably a journal which embraces, you know, science. That it even deigns to publish something attacking rationality shows just how far down the rabbit hole we are.

Bonus phrase: "a regime of rationality still operates in the academy." Err, despite our best efforts?

Keep trying, post-modernists. We'll be sacrificing cows to propitiate the wind gods any day now, thanks to you!

Saturday, May 20, 2017

There's a series of posts to be created from analyzing this post-modern profession of faith, but for now, let's start with the most basic part. Here is the premise of the post, written by a mathematician and approvingly commented by many on that same site.

I probably want you to quit your job, or at least take a demotion. Statistically speaking, you are probably taking up room that should go to someone else. If you are a white cis man (meaning you identify as male and you were assigned male at birth) you almost certainly should resign from your position of power...

(M)ost success happens on the backs of others who did not consent. You have no idea how successful you would have been if you were still you, but with an additional marginalization (not white, or not male, or not cis gender, or with a disability, etc).

Right now, I want to talk about gender equality because the fact that women aren’t actually a demographic minority makes certain arguments easier, but please know that actual solutions require women of color and trans people. Remember having white cis women run the world is no kind of solution.

So, to make it short, white males should resign faculty positions and hand them over to a cornucopia of diverse peoples, selected on the basis of their epidermises and groins.

When you put it that way, it's like describing the mating habits of some birds where plumage and strutting land the babe. It's probably not a bad analogy as this kind of increasingly common drivel is becoming more widely accepted. It's like watching civilization crawl back into the crib and grab its stuffed animals.

But I digress. Like I said, the post and the approval it has received is a treasure trove of content.

The post was published on the American Mathematical Society blog. (The AMS! Look at the level of approval!) One presumes that at one point in time, the AMS had some connection with science and might have chosen to nod, at least casually, to the concept of the scientific method. Here's my question that is unasked in the intersectional feminism sect of post-modern religion.

With what we know from biology, would one expect to see performance differences between the sexes?

Biology shows that male and female brains differ in architecture, size and activating body chemistries. Could this explain the difference in outcomes? Evolution suggests that there should be differences as the two sexes have different roles to play in the propagation of genetic material through time.

That this question isn't addressed, even in passing, is the most telling part of the whole thing. Biology and evolution have been utterly discarded on the website of the American Mathematical Society.

Friday, May 19, 2017

It's roughly 2 AM San Diego time and I'm in a hotel room in Bloomington, IN about to head to the airport to go home. Politics is always low-hanging fruit for a blogger, so we'll go there again, just for the sake of making it easy on yours truly today. Sorry for the tl;dr post with no graphics.

Yesterday, I approvingly quoted Kurt Schlichter's latest rant which was about the media's screaming hype of some scandal or other wherein it's obvious they're trying to bring President Trump down.

This is a coup against us. It’s a coordinated campaign by liberals and their allies in the bureaucracy and media to once and for all ensure their perpetual rule over us.

And now for an opinion that's completely different.

I didn't vote for the guy because I thought he was mentally ill. The lies, the name-calling, the sneering, the intellectual shallowness, the narcissism - he should be in therapy, not the Oval Office. I still think that.

All of the chaos we're seeing was perfectly predictable during the election. If you take a nut like Trump and put him where a hate-filled press can whack him like a piñata, this is what you get. The press would be attacking President Rubio, too, but Marco wouldn't be throwing gasoline on the fire every fifteen minutes.

So I'm conflicted. It's like I want both sides to lose. More accurately, I want both sides to go away. If you made me choose, I'm more sympathetic to Trump than I am to the media. I still can't get over the way they licked the sweat off Obama's body for 8 years and then ran interference for Hillary in the election.

"If you like your plan, you can keep your plan" - that lie cost me thousands of dollars. The press didn't care. Instead of going completely bonkers like they have over whatever this trivial scandal with Trump is, they grabbed the bottle of lotion and went back to rubbing it on Barack Obama.

Hillary sold out the country as Secretary of State for more than $100,000,000. She knowingly mishandled classified information so she could run her scams without fear of detection. Her crimes blow Trump's incompetence out of the water a hundred times over. The press spent the entire election blow drying her hair and doing her nails.

Trump is an idiot. I am unhappy he was elected. We are going to pay for that stupidity for years. The best we can hope for is that he finds something to occupy his time and keeps him quiet while the excellent people he has chosen for his cabinet run the place.

But I still keep coming back to the conclusion that the media simply hates us and that's bigger than the idiocy.

Thursday, May 18, 2017

I had expected that at least some elements of the media would be introspective after the election. I had thought that they might reconsider their blood-oaths to the Democrats and perhaps ponder life outside of the coastal bubbles. I was wrong.

I'm in Indiana right now, the heart of the Trumpian Rebellion. People are doing normal things. Working backhoes, farming, driving trucks, brewing delicious Upland Brewing Company Coastbuster Imperial IPA in Bloomington. These are the folks who make the nummy-noms that are served in the Beltway Starbucks, ship the tires that go round and round on the wheels of the Priuses that take the news people to their offices and provide the taxes that Nancy Pelosi has sold her soul to spend.

Walking around hotels and offices where TVs are ritually tuned to the news, I have seen nothing but breathless, orgasmic reporting of some Trumpian scandal. As far as I can tell, no one here cares. I certainly don't. Still, the TVs are running wall-to-wall with the thing.

Kurt Schlichter is a fire-breather whose material on townhall.com is fun to read, but it's typically over the top. Today, however, he perfectly captured what the moment feels like to me.

This is a coup against us. It’s a coordinated campaign by liberals and their allies in the bureaucracy and media to once and for all ensure their perpetual rule over us.

When Hillary's 9-digit sale of her office as Secretary of State didn't rise to the level of any crime, turning whatever tomfoolery Trump performed into a national scandal simply reeks of, well, just what Kurt said. A coup against us normals.

Dude was elected. The people voted. They knew who he was. They didn't care what George "former Hillary cabana boy" Stephanopoulos and the other DNC lackeys thought. Instead of honoring our selection, they've gone totally over the edge and are engaged in open war against Trump. Rather than trying to get in touch with the bible-toting bigots in flyover country, perhaps even hiring some to staff their offices, they climbed into their bunkers and closed the hatches.

They hate us. That's the only thing I can think as I watch this national meltdown evolve. They simply hate us.

(H)e was duly and legally elected by tens of millions of Americans who had legitimate reasons to support him, who knew they were throwing the long ball, and who, polls suggest, continue to support him. They believe the press is trying to kill him. “He’s new, not a politician, give him a chance.” What would it do to them, what would it say to them, to have him brusquely removed by his enemies after so little time? Would it tell them democracy is a con, the swamp always wins, you nobodies can make your little choices but we’re in control? What will that do to their faith in our institutions, in democracy itself?

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

So I guess the Donald said some things to the Russians that shouldn't have been said. Or maybe he didn't. Or maybe he did, but they weren't a big deal. Or maybe they were a big deal, but we were going to tell them at some point in the future anyway. Or maybe it's a huge deal and it's proof positive he's unfit.

Therein lies the problem. I don't trust Trump. We all know he lies like Hillary in a wind tunnel*. I trust the media even less. They've completely lost their minds and talk about Trump the way an angry woman discusses her unfaithful ex-husband.

So just what is going on here? Who knows? Who cares? All of the data being totally unreliable allows you to step back and realize that Comey being fired, Trump talking to Russians or Chuck Schumer speaking in tongues has no effect on our lives at all.

So Trump said or didn't say something to the Russkies? Whatever. I'm over it.

* - Or Hillary in a grain silo or Hillary at a county fair or Hillary downing shots of Jack Daniels or Hillary reading a book.

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Like most people, I have some phobias. I'm not a big fan of heights, although I was able to overcome much of that by brute force of will. I still can't handle cliffs and two-lane roads next to cliffs are a real issue for me.

My big phobia, however, turns out to be bridges over water. Gephyrophobia is the fear of bridges, but for it to affect me, it's got to be over water and narrow. I can handle 4-lane bridges and larger as I can drive on the inside lane, but 2-lane bridges over long stretches, such as US 301 where it crosses the Potomac, are completely intolerable.

Coming into Virginia from Maryland, it looks like this. It sounds like some nut screaming.

I have no idea what it is, either. It's primal, like my internal cave man is having a total breakdown. This bridge is about a mile long. When I went over it this week, there was light traffic, we were doing 50 MPH, there was minimal wind, it was sunny and there were almost no waves. It was idyllic and I was having to yell at myself to calm down. All in all, it took about 75 seconds to cross the thing and by the end, I was wondering if I was going to black out from the stress. My whole body wanted to shut down and slip into unconsciousness to make the horror go away.

Internally, I was able to watch the psycho-spasm unfold and wonder just what was wrong. I tried reason, but the fear was way beyond that. When I got to the other side, it went away completely.

I've always had compassion for the mentally ill, but as I was going through this, I felt tremendous sorrow and pity for them. I knew that if I made it just another 20 seconds, I'd be completely normal again. What must it be like to have these terrors for hours on end or to have voices in your head that don't go away when you reach some waypoint?

The experience was mentally disjointed and it allowed me a small amount of reflection at the time. Had I been working on a quadratic equation when I got onto the bridge, I might have been able to solve it while 90% of my brain turned into liquid wax and ran out my ears.

I don't know if I can fully describe the raw power of that fear. I think that if I'd been a passenger, I'd have been fine. Maybe that means it was the stress of controlling a car while driving over water.

I know one thing for sure. I'm not going to vacation in the Florida Keys any time soon.

Monday, May 15, 2017

I read in a WSJ article that the vulnerability being exploited by this hack had been patched by Microsoft 8 weeks ago. It may have been that the hackers didn't know about the vulnerability until Microsoft told everyone in the process of releasing their patch. Knowing the large organizations are slow to apply patches to all of their computers, the hackers could have started working on their attack after the patch had been released.

Sunday, May 14, 2017

I'm on a trip to the East Coast this week and I've got a Nissan Juke as my rental car. 2-doors and nimble, it turns on a dime and has decent pick-up. It's got a back seat, but that's more for show than anything else. I wouldn't put friends back there,

You can feel the road, but it's still comfortable. The instrument layout is clean and easy to understand. It's got reverse camera, which I love.

The only drawback is it wants you to download and use an app called NissanConnect to play media from your phone via bluetooth. Grr. It wants you to create an account with Nissan and sign in and blah blah blah. Why am I doing this? All I want is to play my Newsboys station from Pandora. Very annoying. That and the aux cable input doesn't work, so no music for KT on this trip, at least no music from my phone.

Saturday, May 13, 2017

One of our sons recently turned me on to Shark Tank. It's a show where panel of 5 venture capitalists are pitched ideas by entrepreneurs. It's loads of fun.

One of the recent shows featured a pair of girls who had come up with a new line of lipsticks, most in non-traditional colors. One of the girls was wearing a blue-green lipstick. Your eyes naturally bled the color into her teeth, possibly through reflection, giving them that just-ate-handfuls-of-raw-seaweed look.

Hideous.

The girls talked about how their lipsticks would empower women by allowing them to transgress the unwritten rules of fashion and express themselves freely. I couldn't understand this at all. I thought the whole idea of lipstick, makeup and fashion was to empower women by emotionally subjugating men. How being deliberately ugly was going to improve on this was a mystery to me.

The interesting thing here is that our notions of beauty are designed to empower women by telling them what men want. Men want to be emotionally subjugated. We want women to be given power over us through sexual attraction. That's why there is a standard of beauty, so we can get more of what we want which is, effectively, the empowerment of women.

My wife and I teach the remarriage class for the Diocese of San Diego. The class always starts with each couple standing up and telling their love story. Every guy we've ever had and I mean every guy has talked about how hot he thought his fiancee was. That was why they proposed in the first place. How much more empowerment can you get than some dude offering you his life?

These days that's not empowerment, I guess. Like I said yesterday, I'm going through life in a constant state of confusion lately.

Friday, May 12, 2017

I'm going through life in a constant state of confusion and bewilderment these days. Nothing seems to make sense any more. Take, for example, this editorial in the WaPo, entitled, How to stop racism from winning on college campuses. I wasn't aware there was much of a contest going on between racism and whatever its opposite is. I seem to be wrong. Dig this.

In a rising national tide of racial intolerance, colleges have not been spared puerile, pathetic and threatening incidents, which play on the volatile campus sensitivities of an era defined by trigger warnings and safe spaces. At AU (American University), African American and other students demanded a “sanctuary space” be established for minority students at a campus cafeteria; a policy granting extensions for final exams to minority students; and an open-door policy for outside groups such as the NAACP to investigate hate crimes and racial incidents at the university.

Apparently, someone hung some bananas from some string and did something else with them as well. It all seemed juvenile to the point of being cartoonish. I'm not sure I can see a real racist doing something like that. Given all of the hoaxes recently, racist acts perpetrated by social justice warriors trying to enfrenzy the populace to fight invisible, but somehow real racism, this smacks of another fake hate crime.

The demand for extensions on final exams is a bit of a tell. When I was in college, we would sometimes have bomb threats during finals, presumably made by students who needed more time to study. It's an old gag and this looks like one of those tricks.

What confuses me most of all is the need for racial bunkers into which people of a particular hue can run like they were bomb shelters during an atomic attack. How can things be that awful at the universities where post-modern progressives aren't simply the majority culture, but an utterly dominant and all-pervasive one? If colleges need these bunkers and they're run by Bernie Bros, why don't we have them on every street corner where the odds of encountering crazed, neo-Confederates are orders of magnitude higher?

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Just so you have your scorecards right, make sure you know that I and others like me - almost everyone who attends Christian concerts - are on the side of hate.

At least that's what we're told by the popular culture.

Last night, my wife and I went to the Chris Tomlin Worship Night in America concert. I'm not a big Chris Tomlin fan, but she's seen some hard rock Christian concerts with me, so I went along happily. Plus I like being with her, so there's that. The bands were excellent and we had a good, hate-filled time. Two anecdotes to show how hateful we were.

Trigger warning: If you experience PTSD episodes from being exposed to pure hate, you might want to stop reading here and go somewhere more loving. Like this.

If you've never been to a Christian pop/rock concert, you need to understand they all work like this: There's music from one or more bands and then before the headliners come out, there's a testimonial and request for donations to some charity. When I say "request," I mean something on the order of a 15-minute infomercial. Last night it was for Compassion International. Talk about a name for a hate group! Can you get any more hateful than "Compassion International?"

The testimonial followed the normal lines. The speaker had traveled to one of the places where the kids were sponsored, in this case, Ethiopia, and seen first hand how sponsoring some charming moppets had transformed their lives from utter degradation to hope and a bright future. The speaker talked about having been in our shoes, full of skepticism that the whole thing was a racket to get our money. He assured us it was not and had tearful stories to prove it.

Volunteers then handed out sponsorship agreement forms to everyone raising their hands. It was about 1,000 people out of the 5,000 or so at the concert. Pure hate in it's more pure and hatey form.

Second, during Chris' concert, he stopped and asked if there were any teenage youth group leaders who could play guitar in the audience. A 15-year-old young lady was found and brought on stage. She was given a guitar and when she heard what song she was going to play with Chris and the band, she happily said she knew it. Everyone cheered. More hate.

They played the song and this shyly smiling girl got to be on stage with a fairly big-name Christian band and strum and sing with them. She started out pretty timid, but got into it as the song went along and by the end, she was more relaxed and having a good time. It was so beautiful that my eyes welled up with tears of hate.

At the end of the song, Chris thanked her and then gave her the guitar. She almost started crying with joy. And hate, too, of course. The crowd went wild. If Leni Riefenstahl had been there, she'd have been filming for insertion into Triumph of the Will: the Director's Cut.

I can't find a clip on YouTube of the event, but here's my poor-quality photo from where we were sitting in the Das Reich seats*.

The girl in the jeans right in the middle was the lucky fraulein.

If by now you're not frothing with rage at the pure hate of this event, you might want to take notes and write to your local university so that they can organize a protest against, err, something or other to stop this kind of thing from ever happening again.

After all, we must make sure that love trumps hate.

* - I wanted to sit in the Totenkampf seats, but, as you know, those are crazy expensive.

Tuesday, May 09, 2017

Someone told me something recently that I desperately needed to hear. What they said was kind, generous and humble. It came completely out of the blue, too. I've been in a huge funk lately due to a confluence of bad events and this brightened everything and will have an effect far off into the future.

Thanks, someone. I needed that.

My theology isn't all that good, but as I understand it, when that little voice inside your head suggests you do something Christ-like, something difficult, something unusual, we Catholics attribute that the Holy Spirit.

Thanks, Holy Dude. I needed that.

If you get a chance to say something nice today, to apologize for a past wrong, to take responsibility for something going sideways or to give a compliment to someone, take it.

Monday, May 08, 2017

My wife is one of the most impressive people I know. In terms of where she started and how far she's made it, if you picked any 100 Americans at random, her story would put her in the top 3, no question about it. When it comes to the tactical and the practical, when she speaks, the wise man listens and takes her suggestions very seriously.

What does she want more than anything else? Grandchildren, done the right way. She would love it if our children found loving spouses, got married in the Church, moved in together after they got married and then made plenty of beautiful babies.

Sunday, May 07, 2017

Have you ever had those times when someone has betrayed you severely? At work, in your family, or maybe a friend? In the past, I hung on to slights like they were life rafts in the middle of the ocean. There was nothing better than righteous fury. It filled my lizard brain with the delightful energy of anger. There wasn't any payoff in it, of course. Whatever the betrayal might have been, it had passed and the job was now to pick up after it, like recovering after a hurricane. Still, I would cling to my status as a Victim of Evil.

I finally realized that whoever betrayed me had chosen that path for a reason that was good enough for them. I had no more control over it than I did the weather. That weather analogy broke my habit of clinging to rage. I felt silly when I realized I was effectively standing outside, atop the ruins of some aspect of my life, yelling at the sky for a hurricane that had passed long ago.

How stupid is that?

It made me feel so ridiculous that I quit the habit then and there.

Hope that helps you in some way.

Don't rebuild, don't plan, don't dream. Just stand outside and yell at the sky for months or even years!

Saturday, May 06, 2017

So the Republicans passed a semi-replacement of ObamaCare and the press is full of stories of controversy, inadequacy and people losing their health care. I have to admit that I only read a few of them. When I did, I wasn't reading for details, but for a sense of the narrative. What I found didn't surprise me save for its completeness.

The stories lacked any sense of context. It's as if ObamaCare was just cruising along and sick children were being given lollipops by smiling nurses who cheerfully treated them for scabies, croup or dropsy, whatever their sad case might be. With bouquets of daisies on their bedside tables, the hopelessly charming little moppets were saying, "Mommy, this medicine tastes yucky!" to which their transgendered caregiver would reply, "Now you must take the medicine, dear, it will make you all better. After you take it, I'll tell you a story." "Mommy, make it the one about the kind bureaucrat who brought the orphans milk!"

Or something like that.

Meanwhile, the reality of the situation was quite different. ObamaCare was collapsing in on itself as insurers ditched one market after another. Premiums and deductibles had reached insane levels.

Deductibles for individuals enrolled in the lowest-priced Obamacare health plans will average more than $6,000 in 2017, the first time that threshold has been cracked in the three years that Affordable Care Act marketplaces have been in business...

Families enrolled in bronze plans will have average deductibles of $12,393, according to the study by the consumer insurance comparison site HealthPocket...

HealthPocket also found that that average premiums, or monthly payments, for bronze plans nationwide will increase 21 percent next year for people who earn too much to qualify for Obamacare subsidies. A 40-year-old unsubsidized bronze plan customer would pay $350.23 each month for their health coverage, compared to $289.88 per month this year.

A $12,000 deductible isn't a health insurance for anything other than catastrophes. Add that to $4000 or so of annual premiums and you're out a whopping $16,000 a year before the thing starts to pay off in earnest.

That reality was completely ignored in the stories I read. It was as if the Republicans passed the bill for no reason other than to kill Americans. Which is exactly what many editorials said in so many words. One that I read this morning actually swore vengeance on the Republicans. It was like something out of war propaganda.

This is insane. This isn't a news media, this is a party organ. Which, I guess, we already knew. Thank God fewer and fewer people trust these swine.

Thursday, May 04, 2017

It's not because he's political or even a raging, snarky partisan. Sometimes they can be funny, too, even when you disagree with them.

Steven Colbert isn't funny because his jokes don't make sense.

His recent anti-Trump spasm culminated when he accused the president of having an intimate relationship with Putin. Ha ha ha?

How does that make any sense at all? Why not charge him with being in love with, oh, I don't know, the star of Hamilton? Trump was clearly Putin's worst outcome of the election. Russia gets most of its money from oil and Trump has taken dramatic steps to increase American oil production. This lowers the price of oil and takes billions of dollars out of the pockets of the Russian oligarchy. It's not that complicated.

Meanwhile, if anyone was kneeling to Putin it was Obama and Clinton. They gave away Crimea, part of Eastern Ukraine, did nothing when the airliner was shot down and let the Russian proxy, Syria, run wild.

If comedy is going to have any bite at all, it has to at least be based partly in truth. Colbert's rant was utterly unmoored from reality. It was so deranged that I'm not sure a religious fundamentalist analogy would do it justice. It was more like complete cognitive dissonance of the type Scott Adams describes.

When your self-image and ego get annihilated ... you can’t simply admit you have been ridiculous all along. Your brain can’t let you do that to yourself. So instead, it concocts weird hallucinations to force-glue your observations into some sort of semi-coherent movie in which you are not totally and thoroughly wrong. That semi-coherent movie will look like a form of insanity to observers.

Wednesday, May 03, 2017

... and ANTIFA and the pussy hat marchers and the DNC chair swearing in public speeches is that we won't have to put up with political ads like this any more.

Now that we've all completely discarded any sense of right and wrong in speech, action and writing, the ammunition is gone for ads where we attack a politician's character. Now that we've elected a liar and the losers are pining for an alternate reality where an even worse liar would have won, there's nothing left at which we can point fingers of shame and not find them pointing right back at us.

Monday, May 01, 2017

I used to wail and gnash my teeth about Japan's debt problem, and it's still staggering, but somehow, they just keep on keepin' on.

TOKYO—The Bank of Japan pushed back against speculation about an early interest rate increase Thursday by mixing an upbeat assessment of the economy with a further lowering of its inflation forecast and a rejection of the need to unwind its ultraeasy policy.

Mr. Kuroda reiterated that the time isn’t ripe to start talking about a policy reversal. He pointed to the distance of the current inflation rate, 0.2% in February, to his 2% target.

0.2% is no inflation at all. That economy isn't going anywhere. Meanwhile, their citizens owe about $71,000 USD apiece on their federal government's debt. Ouch.

And, of course, there's the demographic issue with more adult diapers being sold than baby diapers.

Having issued my Cassandra Call one more time, I can't say that I've got any clue as to when or how this all comes crashing down. Weird.